You know.. I can agree with them on offering different service levels for different prices. I can also see how they can offer a cheaper subscription type that favors their own services (see it as an advertisement sponsored subscription) for as long as they are clear about the consequences. I don't see this as breaking network neutrality.
When they go on about charging other information/service providers for premium services (faster downloads from their servers, working voip etc), they go way beyond this idea of network neutrality, rather they go the way of favoring big and rich content providers over others.
Remote chance that you might actually start reading? (obviously you did)
Never give up hope:)
Yes, yes, "The Skype software has been preset to only accept Intel's chips as having the performance necessary to host conference calls of more than five people,"
Note that this was implemented by Skype after reaching an agreement with Intel. Also note that above statement comes from an Intel spokesman, not from Skype.
It is verified and tested to know that 1) Skype is inefficient with CPU cycles, especially in conference calls. 2) Skype tested with Intel chips and verified that those are capable of performing satisfactorially.
Do you agree that those two points are necessarily true? The statement makes it clear that only the Intel chip was certified for the higher capacity, and as such, only the Intel chips are in the preset list as having the necessary performance.
Yes.
It does not make it clear that no other device will be able of matching the performance.
It makes clear that Skype only accepts Intel CPUs as having this performance (after having accepted money from Intel for doing this). That by definition says that others don't for as far as they are concerned. It is what the word only stands for. They could easily have left that word out if the intention was to explain why it works with Intel and not with others. Leaving it in makes this a statement about non Intel CPUs implicitly.
Read the statement without context and without knowing who said it, and you can quite argue that this is just an explanation of what Skype does, without any implied statements about non Intel CPUs. Prior marketing agreement with Intel and an Intel spokesman saying this however are what make this much more then just that.
Last but not least, if you are trying to argue that this is within the letter of the law, you may be right, but it is definitely against the spirit of the law, and due to that I believe it should not fly in any working legal system.
When you can't compete on your merits, lie but run it by the lawyers first.
And make sure you comply with the letter of the law while in fact going against the spirit of the law. That should not fly in an actually working legal system.
It is end of argument because you are simply not reading what is being said.
- An Intel spokesman made a claim, not a Skype spokesman. - You failed repeatedly to read the claim being made.
So, I'm quite willing to argue about this the moment you actually start reading what is being said, but your posts simply show that you don't, so there is no point in arguing.
I guess it's a bit late to bitch about being tracked and scanned. Just try to live without Visa or MC. Can't rent a car, can't get a hotel room.
Its easy, go live outside the USA.
In mst places on this planet you can get around with cash just fine. The last time I used a creditcard for the kind of things you mention was when I was living in the USA in the early 90s (yeah, I do have one still and use it at times because it is convenient, but definitely not because I wouldn't be able to do what I want or need without one).
In fact, there are substantial parts of the world where a creditcard will buy you nothing whatsoever.
Maybe you should reread what I quoted, specifically the part that I made bold.
The representative didn't give any opinion on his product or AMD's, he merely stated the (true) fact that the software itself discriminated between processors
1. Intel payed Skype to make this statement for them *by putting in the limitation) 2. An Intel representative supposedly said the thing I quoted, INCLUDING the part I made bold. It contains a supposed explanation of why a 10 way call would only work on an Intel cpu.
Add up those 2 things and you have a very clear and deliberate misrepresentation of Intel's competition. That Intel payed someone else to do the 'dirty work' really doesn't change anything here.
If say AMD would use this in a case against Intel, they'd have to show also that this is by agreement between Intel and Skype in order to make products competing with Intel's processors look way worse then tjey are compared to the processors of Intel.
That is still misrepresentation however, regardless of the fact that they payed someone a lot of money to make things look that way.
At any rate, you are probably right that the words alone won't make this stick.
mysql plays the (imo somewhat dirty trick) of putting thier client access libs under the gpl so anyone who wants to use them in a propietry app has to pay and
suppose those licenses became unavailible? would you still wan't to use mysql knowing it would force any code you based on it to be released only under the GPL period?
And how exactly does that hurt opensource software?
Open source software is about making something that you need and then publishing it in the hope it is usefull for others. It is NOT about market penetration, number of users or anything like that.
Also, you may find that some of the people who write open source software for idealistic purposes think that the situation you describe is desirable.
So in the end, the only ones who are potentially hurt by this is those who want to use open source software in their proprietary projects, but well, that is their problem really.
The Skype software has been preset to only accept Intel's chips as having the performance necessary to host conference calls of more than five people,
Unless that quote was wrong (it wasn't mine), he Intel representative definitely made a statement saying that Intel's competition lacks the performance.
So, either the quote is wrong, or you are wrong.
Not that I don't believe what you say about their behavior, I have seen it often enough from them, but the point was that I think that they went beyond that this time.
The Skype software has been preset to only accept Intel's chips as having the performance necessary to host conference calls of more than five people, the representative said.
If that was said by a representative from Intel then that statement quite qualifies as misrepresenting a competing product. Comparison is perfectly fine, misrepresentation is definitely not and Intel should be forced to compensate for it.
That makes you likely more knowledgable on the subject of law then me, it does not by definition give you a better idea about what is fair, rather, it makes you an interested party in having the law involved as much as possible.
We are dealing with a US-based publication and a US-based website, so US laws apply without question.
No, we are dealing with a bunch of multinationals that have to take into account the global market. Arguments from any substantial market do apply (and Europe is not exactly a small market, while there is a lot of cultural exchange with the USA also, so even if you want to limit the argument to the situation in the USA, it does still matter)
We are also dealing with the Berne convention and globalisation of copyright law.
And, while based in the USA, Slashdot has a substantial number of readers from outside the USA.
Oh, and don't forget, people in the USA pay a levy on recordable media as well, abeit a lower one.
I don't care about the laws in other countries, because they are not based on the US notions of fairness or justice, nor are they relevant for settling the issue at hand.
As pointed out, they are somewhat relevant really.
However, the answer to your question is actually one of tort settlement. One of the main theories behind tort settlement is to have loss spreading when possible. Whenever the buck can be passed to insurance - which is composed of thousands of individuals paying, thereby creating a guaratee that there will be payment - tort law is happy. Similarly in the case of recordable media, the justification in your district is that the tariff is for loss spreading. While you may not like it, that's the way it is. You have power over electing your legislators, and if it mattered enough to enough people, then it would change. As it is, people seem content enough with the arrangement. I can support this with a lot more than I'm doing right now, but I'm probably a lot more familiar with legal writings than you, and I don't feel like it, so just trust me.
I don't mind paying the levy, I do mind paying it when it has been made illegal to do the thing that I pay for. You may be familiar with the situation in Canada for example, it is similar for me and a few hundred million more people.
Therefore, the recording industry is not "stealing" from you. It is enacting loss spreading for the infringement that probabilistically results from recordable media purchases.
They are not the government or law enforcement, rather, they are privately held companies that agreed on a deal with consumer organisations and then the government implemented laws to reflect that. Then the entertainment industry has taken actions to subvert any consumer rights following from it step by step.
When it comes down to fairness, it is realy very simple:
1. I pay, so I get to use what I pay for or 2. I don't pay and I don't use.
Any other deal is not fair since there is absolutely no guarantee to make an income from your work.
Just for the record, I do keep to copyright law here except for that I do break the anti-circumvention related part because it stops me from making use of a right that I explicitly have, despite the fact that overhere the entertainment industry claims I don't.
Your jurisdiction is happy with that, and it's not theft by any sense of the word. Theft (larceny) requires a wrongful taking (for example, see the PLNY Section 155.05). Wrongful always means against the law - so if the law allows it is not theft.
First the law can be wrong, and second, as you are a lawyer, you should know that intent and damage is all it takes for doing something wrong enough to at least have to compensate for it. Seeing how the entertainment industry made a deal that they were not too happy with, and now tries to subvert that deal by any means, the intent seems to be there, there is both a motivation and action.
With HD, the whole point is the increased pixels, which means swaping them over the net is a 20-50Gig ordeal.
Still takes less then a day on a somewhat decent DSL or cable connection..
Plus, you need a 2.0Ghz+ PC to decode them without dropping frames...
Luckily those are fairly common, not to say it has become fairly difficult now to buy anything that isn't substantially faster then that, has been the case for a little while.
By the time HD DVD or other HD media are commonplace, those are going to be non-issues.
Where I live, I pay a hefty levy on recordable CDs and DVDs (and virtually any other removable medium usable for storing audio or video). That levy is supposed to be a compensation for 'home copying', despite the fact that officially I shouldn't be able to copy DVDs at least, and they are trying to make it more difficult and illegal to copy a CD.
I am also a smalltime (hobby) FreeBSD and Linux distributor. Tell me, how is the entertainment industry not stealing from me and the people who buy DVDs from me for approx cost price?
This is much closer to stealing then the illegal copying that the typical consumer does, they actually take away money from me and my customers (its not just potentially lost revenue)
Tell me how actually being forced to pay for it regardless of use does not give me a right to also make the copy I already payed for?
In other words, you are entitled to your opinion, but if you insist on calling it stealing, then you have some issue to settle with the recording and movie industry first because they are and have been stealing from 'the people' for at least decades now (copyright term and withholding work from the public domain IS stealing from the people). If you don't agree then you are hypocrit at the very least.
For now, people get blown away by seeing a DVD in full standard definition (for us in pal countries thats 720x576) on a display that can actually show that well (and rightly so, you can actually see some flaws in the CGI of the LOTR movies at SD resolution already for example)
Upsampling to native resolution of my flat pannel (1680x1050, wtf? 16/10 aspect ratio?) with some high-end software scaler makes it a tiny bit better still (mostly because the software scaler is a bit better then the hardware in the flat panel itself).
Watching HD content on this screen shows quite a bit of improvement over a DVD still, but the difference is by far not as dramatic as going from a regular TV set to something that can properly display a DVD in its native resolution.
So.. while many consumers with current HDTV sets will get screwed technically, many will not notice because the result will be 'good enough'.
If someone in Europe wanted to view US movies, it seems they could easily and cheaply buy a US DVD player and watch all they want.
But why should they?
I can walk into any consumer electronics shop and get me a region free/selectable region player (usually with the possibility to disable macrovision and the like as well, at times with alternative firmware).
Those players will have the advantage of playing both pal and ntsc content, being able to play both on the typical pal tv set people have here, has a scart connector so I can use a rgb connection to my TV etc..
Oh, and I don't get the bother of having to find me a 110V outlet or converter.
Usually such players start at around 30 euro (new)
So, no there is no reason for people in Europe to buy a DVD player from the USA, rather, there are lots of reasons to not do so.
Ok, the concept of taking a webpage with everything on it, storing it in a way that it can be loaded locally, and being able to distribute the result is in itself usefull.
It is not grounbdbreaking, not innovative or anything like that. wget and a simple shell or perl script has been able to do this for ages.
My 'sigh' is about the blurb and article.
Rich content.
Let me tell you something, that word makes some kind of sense when relating to webpages, but it is an absolutely stupid word, esp. in this context.
I have floppies dating back to the early 80s that contain 'rich content';, ie, data and functionality. Never mind that normally we call the functionality an application or a program..
The point of PDF files definitely went over the head of the submitter and the writer of the article:
Being able to generate a STATIC document that prints and shows the same everywhere (this is not even a remote option when using html)
Being able to tell if the document has been tampered with.
The second option is the ONE AND ONLY reason why my customers accept getting receipts and the like as pdf files. They can be reasonably sure that 1. I published it, and 2. it wasn't modified on the way.
I don't see how this Unipage is going to replace PDF because of this. This is completely seperate from the fact that Unipage is a usefull idea, and that I may use it as such.
Sun is said to be busy on XEN support for Solaris.
Just having that will be enough to run Solaris and Linux at the same time, and other then a possible management interface I really wonder what zones have to do with this all, if you have any more information it would be appreciated.
And FreeBSD jails have been here forever and they rock.. They compare a lot better to Solaris zones then XEN does.
First difference: XEN runs virtual machines with possibly completely differet guest OSes, jails and zones run instances of their host OS as guests (often sharing the kernel).
Different purpose, different technology, tho with some incidental overlap (you could use both to create multiple 'virtual' environments on one piece of hardware)
You could say that XEN itself is the 'host OS' abeit a very tiny one.
Virtual machines on XEN are called 'domains', and besides using virtual devices, they can also provide them.
Normally, domain 0 is responsible for providing almost all virtual devices (networking, disks etc). This may give the illusion that what runs in domain 0 is the host OS, but it is not, it is just another 'virtual machine', and while it is normal for domain 0 to do this, any domain running the proper kernel can provide devices to XEN.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."
Any person capable of critical thought knows this to be a line that is mostly popular among tyrants and other such scum who like control over people.
That is not conspiracy theory, that is a conclusion from thousands of years of documented history.
It's garbage like this that makes people distrust their government.
And the problem with distrusting your government is?
You know.. I can agree with them on offering different service levels for different prices. I can also see how they can offer a cheaper subscription type that favors their own services (see it as an advertisement sponsored subscription) for as long as they are clear about the consequences. I don't see this as breaking network neutrality.
When they go on about charging other information/service providers for premium services (faster downloads from their servers, working voip etc), they go way beyond this idea of network neutrality, rather they go the way of favoring big and rich content providers over others.
Then why do you keep arguing?
:)
Remote chance that you might actually start reading? (obviously you did)
Never give up hope
Yes, yes, "The Skype software has been preset to only accept Intel's chips as having the performance necessary to host conference calls of more than five people,"
Note that this was implemented by Skype after reaching an agreement with Intel.
Also note that above statement comes from an Intel spokesman, not from Skype.
It is verified and tested to know that
1) Skype is inefficient with CPU cycles, especially in conference calls.
2) Skype tested with Intel chips and verified that those are capable of performing satisfactorially.
Do you agree that those two points are necessarily true? The statement makes it clear that only the Intel chip was certified for the higher capacity, and as such, only the Intel chips are in the preset list as having the necessary performance.
Yes.
It does not make it clear that no other device will be able of matching the performance.
It makes clear that Skype only accepts Intel CPUs as having this performance (after having accepted money from Intel for doing this). That by definition says that others don't for as far as they are concerned. It is what the word only stands for. They could easily have left that word out if the intention was to explain why it works with Intel and not with others. Leaving it in makes this a statement about non Intel CPUs implicitly.
Read the statement without context and without knowing who said it, and you can quite argue that this is just an explanation of what Skype does, without any implied statements about non Intel CPUs. Prior marketing agreement with Intel and an Intel spokesman saying this however are what make this much more then just that.
Last but not least, if you are trying to argue that this is within the letter of the law, you may be right, but it is definitely against the spirit of the law, and due to that I believe it should not fly in any working legal system.
When you can't compete on your merits, lie but run it by the lawyers first.
And make sure you comply with the letter of the law while in fact going against the spirit of the law. That should not fly in an actually working legal system.
It is end of argument because you are simply not reading what is being said.
- An Intel spokesman made a claim, not a Skype spokesman.
- You failed repeatedly to read the claim being made.
So, I'm quite willing to argue about this the moment you actually start reading what is being said, but your posts simply show that you don't, so there is no point in arguing.
Well, you either cannot read or are refusing to understand, sorry, end of argument.
I guess it's a bit late to bitch about being tracked and scanned. Just try to live without Visa or MC. Can't rent a car, can't get a hotel room.
Its easy, go live outside the USA.
In mst places on this planet you can get around with cash just fine. The last time I used a creditcard for the kind of things you mention was when I was living in the USA in the early 90s (yeah, I do have one still and use it at times because it is convenient, but definitely not because I wouldn't be able to do what I want or need without one).
In fact, there are substantial parts of the world where a creditcard will buy you nothing whatsoever.
Maybe you should reread what I quoted, specifically the part that I made bold.
The representative didn't give any opinion on his product or AMD's, he merely stated the (true) fact that the software itself discriminated between processors
1. Intel payed Skype to make this statement for them *by putting in the limitation)
2. An Intel representative supposedly said the thing I quoted, INCLUDING the part I made bold. It contains a supposed explanation of why a 10 way call would only work on an Intel cpu.
Add up those 2 things and you have a very clear and deliberate misrepresentation of Intel's competition. That Intel payed someone else to do the 'dirty work' really doesn't change anything here.
If say AMD would use this in a case against Intel, they'd have to show also that this is by agreement between Intel and Skype in order to make products competing with Intel's processors look way worse then tjey are compared to the processors of Intel.
That is still misrepresentation however, regardless of the fact that they payed someone a lot of money to make things look that way.
At any rate, you are probably right that the words alone won't make this stick.
mysql plays the (imo somewhat dirty trick) of putting thier client access libs under the gpl so anyone who wants to use them in a propietry app has to pay and
suppose those licenses became unavailible? would you still wan't to use mysql knowing it would force any code you based on it to be released only under the GPL period?
And how exactly does that hurt opensource software?
Open source software is about making something that you need and then publishing it in the hope it is usefull for others. It is NOT about market penetration, number of users or anything like that.
Also, you may find that some of the people who write open source software for idealistic purposes think that the situation you describe is desirable.
So in the end, the only ones who are potentially hurt by this is those who want to use open source software in their proprietary projects, but well, that is their problem really.
The Skype software has been preset to only accept Intel's chips as having the performance necessary to host conference calls of more than five people,
Unless that quote was wrong (it wasn't mine), he Intel representative definitely made a statement saying that Intel's competition lacks the performance.
So, either the quote is wrong, or you are wrong.
Not that I don't believe what you say about their behavior, I have seen it often enough from them, but the point was that I think that they went beyond that this time.
The Skype software has been preset to only accept Intel's chips as having the performance necessary to host conference calls of more than five people, the representative said.
If that was said by a representative from Intel then that statement quite qualifies as misrepresenting a competing product. Comparison is perfectly fine, misrepresentation is definitely not and Intel should be forced to compensate for it.
First of all, I am a lawyer.
That makes you likely more knowledgable on the subject of law then me, it does not by definition give you a better idea about what is fair, rather, it makes you an interested party in having the law involved as much as possible.
We are dealing with a US-based publication and a US-based website, so US laws apply without question.
No, we are dealing with a bunch of multinationals that have to take into account the global market. Arguments from any substantial market do apply (and Europe is not exactly a small market, while there is a lot of cultural exchange with the USA also, so even if you want to limit the argument to the situation in the USA, it does still matter)
We are also dealing with the Berne convention and globalisation of copyright law.
And, while based in the USA, Slashdot has a substantial number of readers from outside the USA.
Oh, and don't forget, people in the USA pay a levy on recordable media as well, abeit a lower one.
I don't care about the laws in other countries, because they are not based on the US notions of fairness or justice, nor are they relevant for settling the issue at hand.
As pointed out, they are somewhat relevant really.
However, the answer to your question is actually one of tort settlement. One of the main theories behind tort settlement is to have loss spreading when possible. Whenever the buck can be passed to insurance - which is composed of thousands of individuals paying, thereby creating a guaratee that there will be payment - tort law is happy. Similarly in the case of recordable media, the justification in your district is that the tariff is for loss spreading. While you may not like it, that's the way it is. You have power over electing your legislators, and if it mattered enough to enough people, then it would change. As it is, people seem content enough with the arrangement. I can support this with a lot more than I'm doing right now, but I'm probably a lot more familiar with legal writings than you, and I don't feel like it, so just trust me.
I don't mind paying the levy, I do mind paying it when it has been made illegal to do the thing that I pay for. You may be familiar with the situation in Canada for example, it is similar for me and a few hundred million more people.
Therefore, the recording industry is not "stealing" from you. It is enacting loss spreading for the infringement that probabilistically results from recordable media purchases.
They are not the government or law enforcement, rather, they are privately held companies that agreed on a deal with consumer organisations and then the government implemented laws to reflect that. Then the entertainment industry has taken actions to subvert any consumer rights following from it step by step.
When it comes down to fairness, it is realy very simple:
1. I pay, so I get to use what I pay for
or
2. I don't pay and I don't use.
Any other deal is not fair since there is absolutely no guarantee to make an income from your work.
Just for the record, I do keep to copyright law here except for that I do break the anti-circumvention related part because it stops me from making use of a right that I explicitly have, despite the fact that overhere the entertainment industry claims I don't.
Your jurisdiction is happy with that, and it's not theft by any sense of the word. Theft (larceny) requires a wrongful taking (for example, see the PLNY Section 155.05). Wrongful always means against the law - so if the law allows it is not theft.
First the law can be wrong, and second, as you are a lawyer, you should know that intent and damage is all it takes for doing something wrong enough to at least have to compensate for it. Seeing how the entertainment industry made a deal that they were not too happy with, and now tries to subvert that deal by any means, the intent seems to be there, there is both a motivation and action.
Th
With HD, the whole point is the increased pixels, which means swaping them over the net is a 20-50Gig ordeal.
Still takes less then a day on a somewhat decent DSL or cable connection..
Plus, you need a 2.0Ghz+ PC to decode them without dropping frames...
Luckily those are fairly common, not to say it has become fairly difficult now to buy anything that isn't substantially faster then that, has been the case for a little while.
By the time HD DVD or other HD media are commonplace, those are going to be non-issues.
Where I live, I pay a hefty levy on recordable CDs and DVDs (and virtually any other removable medium usable for storing audio or video). That levy is supposed to be a compensation for 'home copying', despite the fact that officially I shouldn't be able to copy DVDs at least, and they are trying to make it more difficult and illegal to copy a CD.
I am also a smalltime (hobby) FreeBSD and Linux distributor. Tell me, how is the entertainment industry not stealing from me and the people who buy DVDs from me for approx cost price?
This is much closer to stealing then the illegal copying that the typical consumer does, they actually take away money from me and my customers (its not just potentially lost revenue)
Tell me how actually being forced to pay for it regardless of use does not give me a right to also make the copy I already payed for?
In other words, you are entitled to your opinion, but if you insist on calling it stealing, then you have some issue to settle with the recording and movie industry first because they are and have been stealing from 'the people' for at least decades now (copyright term and withholding work from the public domain IS stealing from the people). If you don't agree then you are hypocrit at the very least.
For now, people get blown away by seeing a DVD in full standard definition (for us in pal countries thats 720x576) on a display that can actually show that well (and rightly so, you can actually see some flaws in the CGI of the LOTR movies at SD resolution already for example)
Upsampling to native resolution of my flat pannel (1680x1050, wtf? 16/10 aspect ratio?) with some high-end software scaler makes it a tiny bit better still (mostly because the software scaler is a bit better then the hardware in the flat panel itself).
Watching HD content on this screen shows quite a bit of improvement over a DVD still, but the difference is by far not as dramatic as going from a regular TV set to something that can properly display a DVD in its native resolution.
So.. while many consumers with current HDTV sets will get screwed technically, many will not notice because the result will be 'good enough'.
Well, not exactly, have to do with 720x576..
If someone in Europe wanted to view US movies, it seems they could easily and cheaply buy a US DVD player and watch all they want.
But why should they?
I can walk into any consumer electronics shop and get me a region free/selectable region player (usually with the possibility to disable macrovision and the like as well, at times with alternative firmware).
Those players will have the advantage of playing both pal and ntsc content, being able to play both on the typical pal tv set people have here, has a scart connector so I can use a rgb connection to my TV etc..
Oh, and I don't get the bother of having to find me a 110V outlet or converter.
Usually such players start at around 30 euro (new)
So, no there is no reason for people in Europe to buy a DVD player from the USA, rather, there are lots of reasons to not do so.
Bad analogy. Collecting rain in buckets would be akin to using the Gimp or suich, which is perfectly legal for all I know.
And that Start menu ripoff that appears in both KDE and GNOME...I wonder where that came from? Hmmmmmm. And the "taskbar"...
Lotus smartcenter, it predates Windows 95 by quite some time.
Let me tell you something, that word makes some kind of sense when relating to webpages, but it is an absolutely stupid word, esp. in this context.
I have floppies dating back to the early 80s that contain 'rich content';, ie, data and functionality. Never mind that normally we call the functionality an application or a program..
The second option is the ONE AND ONLY reason why my customers accept getting receipts and the like as pdf files. They can be reasonably sure that 1. I published it, and 2. it wasn't modified on the way.
I don't see how this Unipage is going to replace PDF because of this. This is completely seperate from the fact that Unipage is a usefull idea, and that I may use it as such.
Sun is said to be busy on XEN support for Solaris.
Just having that will be enough to run Solaris and Linux at the same time, and other then a possible management interface I really wonder what zones have to do with this all, if you have any more information it would be appreciated.
Solaris Zones...
Are here and they rock
And FreeBSD jails have been here forever and they rock.. They compare a lot better to Solaris zones then XEN does.
First difference: XEN runs virtual machines with possibly completely differet guest OSes, jails and zones run instances of their host OS as guests (often sharing the kernel).
Different purpose, different technology, tho with some incidental overlap (you could use both to create multiple 'virtual' environments on one piece of hardware)
You could say that XEN itself is the 'host OS' abeit a very tiny one.
Virtual machines on XEN are called 'domains', and besides using virtual devices, they can also provide them.
Normally, domain 0 is responsible for providing almost all virtual devices (networking, disks etc). This may give the illusion that what runs in domain 0 is the host OS, but it is not, it is just another 'virtual machine', and while it is normal for domain 0 to do this, any domain running the proper kernel can provide devices to XEN.